Leavings of Las Vegas

John at the Casino

I have seen another New York, a city that intensifies the danger as it trades grit for sleaze. At Las Vegas's New York-New York Hotel, elevator cabs and hallway wallpaper imitate the details of famous skyscrapers. Naturally those same landmarks cover the exterior. It is a facade of facades, a skyline as compressed and tasteless as instant soup mix.

Geography lessens

Within, lobby cafes make up a sanitized Greenwich Village street scene, while the Bronx and Queens become areas of the casino. I guess they've always been a crap shoot. Just as appropriately, Soho is the souvenir shop.

Outside, another Brooklyn Bridge stretches its walkway wide enough to encourage casino traffic. Walking across the original, you feel gloriously open to the sky while immersed in the delicate strength of supporting cables. This one settles for the lesser joys of fakery. It has to: there is no openness in Las Vegas and no free support, unless your plastic has a line of credit.

Only the terrors are real, especially for hotel guests: a roller coaster goes by their window every 110 seconds. I admit it: I took the ride, ducked in my seat the whole way, and held my glasses.

But Vegas would be loud and scary without a roller coaster. Everywhere slot machines buzz and chime, matching the deafening visual noise all around of neon, glitter, and dark shadow. The sounds are there right at dawn, and so are the stereotypes. At every hour, cocktail waitresses trot by half awake themselves in uniform, the kind that pushes their breasts up.

Downtown and the Strip could as well be one six-mile-long casino, just changing slightly in decor as you navigate from hotel to hotel. Prefer half-naked women in togas? Try Caesar's Palace. Prefer yet another way to confuse inside and outside, day and night? Try the Galleria downtown. Surrounding them all, a flat expanse of auto shops and malls stretches out as far as the eye can see, baking in the sun, 100 degrees in the rare and desperately needed shade.

No risk, all obligation

Business travelers with expense accounts may as well hold out for dinner: you can eat well if you can afford it and if you can stand one more knock-off in a city of knock-offs. There are plenty—Emeril's from New Orleans, the Cactus Cafe from Sante Fe, Spago from LA, Morton's from Chicago, the Palm from New York, the coffee shop and bar from hell.

It would be another kind of fakery to call Vegas a den of iniquity. Forget the indulgence and those waitresses. Think of Disneyland for an older crowd, just another part of capitalism run amok. As they turn over the dollar bills, visitors and staff don't look at all like handsome young drunks, compulsive gamblers, or amusing kitsch. Except for the cheap Hispanic labor, waiters and guests alike are well scrubbed and overweight.

It is not just middle America that glamorizes Las Vegas. The alienated love to imagine that they have taken risks to get there. But this is not the movies or Hunter Thompson; this is TV. Matronly visitors feed their quarters into the slots with the same unsmiling expression of a night transfixed in front of the tube. They have stumbled on the soullessness of a new machine.

In gambling, a trick is cheating, but plastic is for all to see. The best fakers have learned to lay their cards on the table.

jhaber@haberarts.com